Clarissa Harlowe, Samuel Richardson [black authors fiction .txt] 📗

is a clue that has led me to account for all his behaviour to you ever since you have been in his hands. Allow me a brief retrospection of it all. We both know, that pride, revenge, and a delight to tread in unbeaten paths, are principal ingredients in the character of this finished libertine.

☞ He hates all your family⁠—yourself excepted: and I have several times thought, that I have seen ☞ him stung and mortified that love has obliged him to kneel at your footstool, because you are a Harlowe. Yet is this wretch a savage in love.⁠—Love ☞ that humanizes the fiercest spirits, has not been able to subdue his. His pride, and the credit which a ☞ few plausible qualities, sprinkled among his odious ones, have given him, have secured him too good a reception from our eye-judging, our undistinguishing, our self-flattering, our too-confiding sex, to make assiduity and obsequiousness, and a conquest of his unruly passions, any part of his study.

☞ He has some reason for his animosity to all the men, and to one woman of your family. He has always shown you, and his own family too, that he ☞ prefers his pride to his interest. He is a declared marriage-hater; a notorious intriguer; full of his inventions, and glorying in them: he never could draw you into declarations of love; nor till your ☞ wise relations persecuted you as they did, to receive his addresses as a lover. He knew that you professedly disliked him for his immoralities; he could not, therefore, justly blame you for the coldness and indifference of your behaviour to him.

☞ The prevention of mischief was your first main view in the correspondence he drew you into. He ought not, then, to have wondered that you declared your preference of the single life to any matrimonial engagement. He knew that this was always your ☞ preference; and that before he tricked you away so artfully. What was his conduct to you afterwards, that you should of a sudden change it? Thus was your whole behaviour regular, consistent, and dutiful to those to whom by birth you owed duty; and neither prudish, coquettish, nor tyrannical to him.

☞ He had agreed to go on with you upon those your own terms, and to rely only on his own merits and future reformation for your favour.

☞ It was plain to me, indeed, to whom you communicated all that you knew of your own heart, though not all of it that I found out, that love had pretty early gained footing in it. And this you yourself would have discovered sooner than you ☞ did, had not his alarming, his unpolite, his rough conduct, kept it under.

☞ I knew by experience that love is a fire that is not to be played with without burning one’s fingers: I knew it to be a dangerous thing for two single persons of different sexes to enter into familiarity and correspondence with each other: Since, as to the latter, must not a person be capable of premeditated art, who can sit down to write, and not write from the heart?⁠—And a woman to write her heart to a man practised in deceit, or even to a man of some character, what advantage does it give him over her?

☞ As this man’s vanity had made him imagine, that no woman could be proof against love, when his address was honourable; no wonder that he struggled, like a lion held in toils, against a passion that he thought not returned. And how could you, at first, show a return in love, to so fierce a spirit, and who had seduced you away by vile artifices, but to the approval of those artifices.

☞ Hence, perhaps, it is not difficult to believe, that it became possible for such a wretch as this to give way to his old prejudices against marriage; and to that revenge which had always been a first passion with him. This is the only way, I think, to account for his horrid views in bringing you to a vile house. And now may not all the rest be naturally accounted for?⁠—His delays⁠—his teasing ways⁠—his bringing you to bear with his lodging in the same house⁠—his making you pass to the people of ☞ it as his wife, though restrictively so, yet with hope, no doubt, (vilest of villains as he is!) to take you ☞ at an advantage⁠—his bringing you into the company of his libertine companions⁠—the attempt of imposing upon you that Miss Partington for a bedfellow, very probably his own invention for the worst of purposes⁠—his terrifying you at many different times⁠—his obtruding himself upon you when you went out to church; no doubt to prevent your finding out what the people of the house were⁠—the advantages he made of your brother’s foolish project with Singleton. See, my dear, how naturally all this follows from ☞ the discovery made by Miss Lardner. See how the monster, whom I thought, and so often called, ☞ a fool, comes out to have been all the time one of the greatest villains in the world! But if this is so, what, (it would be asked by an indifferent person), has hitherto saved you? Glorious creature!⁠—What, morally speaking, but your watchfulness! What but that, and the majesty of your virtue; the native dignity, which, in a situation so very difficult, (friendless, destitute, passing for a wife, cast into the company of creatures accustomed to betray and ruin innocent hearts), has hitherto enabled you to baffle, overawe, and confound, such a dangerous libertine as this; so habitually remorseless, as you have observed him to be; so very various in his temper, so inventive, so seconded, so supported, so instigated, too probably, as he has been!⁠—That native dignity, that heroism, I will call it, which has, on all proper occasions, exerted